PNC Merchant Services for every industry, not just the ones it already serves

PNC Merchant Services, stable acquirer, industry-aware payments layer

PNC Merchant Services is the merchant-acquiring arm of one of the largest U.S. commercial banks. It gives you enterprise-grade processing, a banking relationship your CFO already trusts, and next-business-day funding into PNC business checking. What it doesn't give you, on its own, is an industry-aware payment experience tuned to the way distributors, manufacturers, healthcare providers, nonprofits, schools, government buyers, professional-services firms, and subscription businesses actually collect money.

That's the layer Clarity Payment Hub supplies. On top of PNC's acquiring rails, Payment Hub adds branded industry checkout flows, a self-service customer portal tailored to each vertical, Level 3 auto-enrichment for commercial-card programs, ACH, tokenized recurring billing, and 25+ ERP connectors, so a distributor on Sage, a clinic on Epicor, a nonprofit on NetSuite, and a school on Oracle all get an experience that matches how their industry buys.

What PNC owns, authorization, settlement, funds flow, your banking relationship, stays with PNC. What Payment Hub owns, the industry-specific payment pattern, the ERP posting, the customer-facing portal, extends PNC into the verticals it doesn't reach natively. Nothing about your PNC contract, your Fiserv-processed rates, or your next-business-day funding changes.

How Payment Hub connects PNC to your ERP

Clarity Connect, the integration engine under Payment Hub with 15+ years of active development, reads from and writes to your ERP in real time using each platform's supported API layer. PNC Merchant Services stays in control of authorization, settlement, and funding. Clarity stays in control of the ERP-side posting and the customer experience.

For cloud ERPs (NetSuite, Acumatica, Dynamics 365 BC, SAP S/4HANA Cloud) Clarity Connect talks directly to the ERP's cloud APIs. For on-premise systems (Dynamics GP/NAV, Sage 100/300, SAP ECC, Oracle EBS, SYSPRO, Epicor Prophet 21/Eclipse/Eagle) we use a lightweight outbound-only secure agent that calls from inside your network, no inbound firewall ports to open, no VPN tunnel required.

Industries PNC + Payment Hub serves

PNC Merchant Services is strong, stable, and widely adopted, but on its own it's processor-shaped, not industry-shaped. Paired with Clarity Payment Hub, PNC becomes an industry-aware payments platform across the eight verticals Clarity has supported for 20+ years.

What PNC ships natively vs. what Payment Hub adds

PNC Merchant Services is a strong processor with real banking-side advantages. It is not, however, an ERP-integration platform. Here's exactly where the stack divides.

The ERPs Payment Hub brings to the PNC Merchant Services deployment:

Every payment method your B2B customers need

PNC Merchant Services supports the full payment stack a B2B merchant actually uses, commercial and consumer cards, ACH, virtual terminal, recurring. Payment Hub surfaces each method in a branded, self-service portal and hands the data back to the ERP in real time.

For large B2B accounts, we commonly configure ACH as the default method above a dollar threshold, protecting card-processing economics on seven-figure invoices while still giving customers a one-click experience. PNC Merchant Services handles all methods through the same settlement flow into your PNC business checking.

Level 3 automation and CEDP readiness

PNC's Commercial Merchant Services program supports Level 2 and Level 3 interchange optimization, but the savings only land when clean invoice-level data makes it to the gateway. That's the piece most PNC merchants leave on the table. Payment Hub closes it.

How PNC's Level 3 program actually works

Level 2 and Level 3 are enhanced data fields that the card networks require to qualify large B2B card transactions for the lowest interchange tiers. Level 2 adds sales tax and customer code. Level 3 adds invoice line items, purchase order number, freight, duty, product codes, unit of measure, and more. PNC's commercial program accepts those fields, but something upstream has to populate them, transaction by transaction.

Most merchants processing through PNC pass the bare minimum Level 1 data and leave the Level 2/3 fields empty. That leaves commercial-card transactions qualifying at standard commercial interchange instead of the optimized B2B tier, a gap of roughly 0.80% to 1.50% per qualifying transaction. On $5M of annual commercial-card volume that's $40,000–$75,000 in annual margin quietly lost to interchange.

Clarity Payment Hub feeds the line-item, tax, and customer-code data from your ERP directly into PNC's transaction flow on every eligible transaction, nothing for your AR team to key, nothing for the customer to fill out. Level 3 qualification happens automatically whenever the card and transaction are eligible.

CEDP, Visa's Commercial Enhanced Data Program

Visa is tightening the rules. The Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP) requires higher-quality B2B transaction data to qualify for the lowest interchange tiers, applied to any merchant processing commercial-card volume, PNC customers included. Original enforcement was April 2025, extended to October 2025. Merchants whose payment flow can't pass clean enhanced data will see B2B-qualified rates quietly degrade.

Payment Hub pulls the actual line-item, SKU, and tax data directly from your ERP on every transaction, no separate catalog to maintain, no manual mapping, no drift between ERP and gateway. Your PNC Merchant Services deployment is CEDP-compliant from day one.

Branded self-service portal and AR automation

PNC Merchant Services ships the gateway and the funding pipe. Payment Hub ships the customer-facing experience and the AR-team back office, on top of your PNC account, with your branding.

What the customer sees

A branded payment portal at your domain, invited from your invoice email, your statement, or a signed single-use Quick Pay link. Customers log in and see their full AR picture: open invoices pulled live from the ERP, statements, credit balances, and tokenized wallets for card and ACH. They can pay a single invoice, consolidate multiple invoices into one payment, apply credits, pay on account, or enroll in auto-pay, all posted back to the ERP in real time.

What the AR team sees

A clean ERP-native view of applied cash, PNC-authorized, tokenized, already posted. No end-of-day reconciliation, no spreadsheet matching, no lookups between the gateway report and the AR subledger. The gap between "PNC confirmed authorization" and "cash applied in the ERP" shrinks from overnight batch to seconds.

What the finance team sees

Level 3 optimization firing on eligible commercial cards, ACH defaulting above a configurable dollar threshold, surcharging or cash-discount running compliantly where elected, and a single pane of glass across every buyer, every ERP, every payment method, all still processed by PNC, funded to PNC business checking, and governed by PNC's merchant-services agreement.

Security, PCI scope, and enterprise compliance

PNC Merchant Services is PCI DSS compliant and built on Fiserv's certified processing rails. Clarity Payment Hub is built to push your deployment to the lightest possible compliance scope and leave the cardholder-data environment at PNC / Fiserv where it belongs.

• Tokenization at PNC. Every card and ACH account is tokenized directly in PNC's PCI-certified gateway vault. Raw credentials never touch Payment Hub's infrastructure and never touch your servers.
• SAQ A scope for most merchants. Because cardholder data is captured and stored entirely inside PNC / Fiserv environments, your PCI self-assessment drops to SAQ A, the lightest tier, with no cardholder-data environment to audit on your side.
• SOC 2 Type II. Clarity Ventures operates to SOC 2 Type II standards. Security, availability, confidentiality, and data-handling controls are independently audited on an ongoing basis.
• Fraud controls. PNC / Fiserv-level AVS, CVV, and velocity checks combine with portal-level controls: invoice-bound authentication, customer-matched billing addresses, signed single-use Quick Pay links. Defense profile tuned to B2B invoice fraud rather than consumer card fraud.
• Outbound-only agent for on-premise ERPs. No inbound firewall ports. No VPN tunnel. No public ERP exposure.
• Bank-grade underwriting. PNC Merchant Services underwrites and governs the merchant account under the same regulatory framework as the rest of PNC Bank, the operational resilience and compliance posture that comes with a top-10 U.S. bank.

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